RetroClips

Manhatta is widely credited as the first American avant-garde film and the direct model for the city symphony genre that followed, its clearest descendant being Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, already on this site. It was the only film collaboration between photographer Paul Strand and Precisionist painter Charles Sheeler, and its intertitles are lines lifted straight from Walt Whitman's poem Mannahatta, pairing 1921 New York with 1860s verse about the same city.